Radical Animals!

Cher nobil and what are the radst baddest radio resistors in the world. Discover this and more as we answered the age old question would you rather get killed by a giant radioactive hamster or killer bananas? So today I'm especially excited because joining us is particle physicist at you See Irvine and co host of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, Daniel Whitson. Welcome, Daniel, Thanks very much for having me on. I'm excited to be on your Creature Features.

What kind of horror name would we give this one? Because we're talking about radioactivity and how animals adapt to it, and I feel like that is there's a lot of like creature feature movies like that, like The Radioactive Swamp Lizard. I'm not a fan of those movies though, because in those movies, every single time the scientist is the bad guy. It's always evil scientists can't think about the consequences of their research, you know, blinded by greed or ambition, and

ends up destroying the world. Right exactly as if the scientists just like I want to make a mega hamster that's radioactive and no one can stop me. For I am driven by science. It's never been my motivation. And I take some motivation to get a bed in the mornings, but it's never mega death hamster. I mean, it's not a bad motivation necessarily, but it's not your motive vation, and then I can respect that. Yes, So, so I am really excited to learn about radiation. I know a

little bit the basics of it, you know. I know it's not necessarily all Homer Simpson at the power plant, you know, but there's a lot in that that we don't learn from the Simpsons. So what what is radiation? Like we think when we think radiation, we think, you know, nuclear waste. But it's a lot more than that, right, It is in fact, and the most general way to think about radiation is that it's just energy deposited by

waves or particles. Usually we think of radiation, you're thinking of things like gamma rays or X rays, and that's a good example of radiation, and those are all just different kinds of light. But but radiation can be either waves like light, or it can be particles like you know, tiny little bullets like protons or neutrons. But the key thing to understand is that radiation really is like a tiny little bullet because it's deposit energy in your body,

and that's not always good. You know, every time you get you go out in the sunshine and you get warmed up, you're absorbing the sun's radiation. So not all radiation is bad, you know, just like too much radiation is bad, or particles with too much energy are bad because they will rip through you like a bullet. So it's a very general term and only sort of parts of it are bad. But you know, the bad parts

get more pressed than the good parts. And that's something I was gonna ask about because when non physicists like me here radiation we kind of think of like a nuclear bomb or geranium. But there's a difference between ionizing radiation and other types of radiation, right, yeah, exactly, Like nobody says, hey, I'm gonna go outside and soak up some radiation that sounds nice and toasty, or the radiation that now though that sounds that sounds bad. Us were

like time to get those radiation rays. Yeah, exactly. So there is radiation that your body just absorbs and deposits a little energy and it warms you up, you know, and that's okay usually um, But then there's particles and photons that have enough energy to really do damage. And so if you thinking, like if you zoom in microscopically to your body, your body is made out of cells, which are made out of molecules, and each of those

molecules has atoms. And the microscopic picture there is you have like a nucleus, protons and neutrons, and surrounding that are electrons, and they're all tied together with various chemical bonds. Right, you have like one atom next to the other one they're sharing electron for example. So what happens when when radiation comes in, like a high energy photon for example, it comes in, it kicks that electron off. That's what ionizing means. It makes it an ion, it removes the

electron and that's not good. Right. You had some happy chemistry going on to make your life function and now you have different chemistry, which is usually bad, although you know sometimes it's good, right. I mean, you know, our DNA is made out of proteins, which are made out of molecules, and those can get kind of messed up. And that's why. I if you get a really bad sunburn, that's you know, that is a type of radiation. It's not always good. You go out, you get a little

bit of sun, that's okay. But the more sun you get, the more you're actually exposing yourself to UV radiation and that can actually start to mess with your cells on the DNA level, which is kind of it's hard to imagine that you can just like start messing with your DNA by standing out in the sun, but that's exactly what happens. Yeah. I think of d N a sort

of like is the hard drive for your body. It's like, you know, storing the recipes for everything you need to do, and then thing comes in and basically flips a bit and says, oh, you're gonna have a cup of sugar, and now you're gonna have a cup of assault. Like, now the recipe doesn't work anymore because you've screwed it up. And right if my if my DNA is like my

hard drive. And then there's like a billion screenshots of cute animals on the desktop, all unorganized, completely making the desktop unusable, and then you v radiation gets it and then it scrambles all those cat pictures and turns them into like one mega hamster picture, that nuclear hamster exactly. Uh and uh. And although you know you should speak to this because it's biological, but sometimes you want that.

Sometimes you want a little bit of change, right, Like evolution requires mutations in your DNA, and so you want some mutations, and naturally occurring radiation from the sky or from whatever from the ground is part of what gives you that variation. So one way to explore new new recipes for life is to incur little mistakes in your DNA, and radiation is an important way for that to happen. You just you want the right amount. You know, you

want to be in the goldilocks zone exactly. Yeah, you don't want to get blasted with radiation, but a little bit it's not bad for life in general. And we're actually going to talk about that contradiction in the framework of Chernobyl, which I think a lot of people are familiar with. It's because it's such a big deal. It's one of the biggest nuclear plant disasters in the world, and it was an awesome TV show. Yeah, I cannot

watch that TV show. I really should because I've heard it's great and it's at least somewhat historically accurate, but like just the idea, it's yeah, I think it's I remember reading hospital descriptions of like what was happening to the patients who had gotten this acute radiation poisoning, and basically they were you know, their skin was falling off there, you know, they were melting from It's just like something I never want to imagine happening to a human. So

it's's it was definitely in the very bad category. But I want to go on the record is saying it was not the fault of the scientists. It was all the politicians and the bureaucrats and all that stuff. So and I think the show kind of the show portrays that accurately, right, Like they show how because um so for people who maybe don't know or or just kind

of know very generally. On April, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine had a routine safety test that ended up triggering a nuclear chain reaction, which sounds there's a lot of steps in between obviously that I'm skipping over, but it was there is a lot of political pressure on them to complete these tests even though it wasn't necessarily safe, and a lot of like basically safety safeguards

that had been ignored leading up to the disaster. So it wasn't something that just happened out of the blue, right, That's right, Yeah, exactly. They had built a very sort of fragile style of reactor because it was cheaper, um, and then the whole confluence of events led to a spot where they couldn't control the reaction anymore and basically exploded. It turned from a nuclear reactor essentially into a nuclear bomb.

And you know, the difference between those two is like whether it's a controlled the knob dial so you're just letting a little bit of heat out, or it's totally uncontrolled than just taken off right, it's like making delicious fries versus a grease fire. It's a seemingly small difference, but now it's Yeah, I think it is. It is

important that this was not mad scientists gone awry. It was mad politicians trying to save a few cents on construction here and there, and until you basically ignored a lot of safety guidelines that you that could have prevented this from happening. I think something that the show captured really well was the sort of weirdly invisible nature of the of the danger. Like you could be standing near Chernobyl and you wouldn't feel anything immediately. You can't sense

the radiation. It's not like it's physically pushing you over or anything. You don't feel the tiny little bullets hitting you, but they are. They're there. They're shredding you. And the longer you stand there, the more you get shredded, the more something could change something critical bit in your DNA and end up giving you cancer. Yeah, it's really horrifying.

I mean it's I think it is sort of something that feels especially relevant now when we are facing this the pandemic, which I hate bringing it up all the time, but it's just ever present, and it's when you have something that's invisible, you can't see radiation, you can't, at least not with human eyes. You can't see something like

coronavirus with human eyes, but it's there. And then when we ignore scientists, like I think, now I didn't watch the cher Nobil series, but I think someone told me about this scene where there's like a scientist in a helicopter with like, uh, the helicopter pilot and then like the politician and they're like, you know, he's saying, like we gotta fly over and show like things aren't so bad or something. He's like, no, if we fly over, we're gonna die because we're gonna get It's like, well, no,

we don't see anything. And it's like it's just like, oh my god, just listen to the scientists. Please, im I yelled at the screen. In so many movies, please just listen to the scientists. It's like Redisaster. Every disaster movie starts with someone being like, we don't need to listen to scientists. Let's let's do budget cuts on this this little little device that will save human lives. But

it's it's been happening a while. So what happened when the actually triggered a nuclear chain reaction, was a steam explosion and reactor core fire released airborne radioactive contamination. So it that is like, yeah, like you said, a nuclear bomb essentially, So it didn't just kill people in the explosion. The ionizing radiation that was a result of the explosion hospitalized a hundred and thirty four power plants staff and fireman and killed twenty eight. Like I said, in the

worst way you can imagine. It's really uh, it's a fascinating story, but if you are sensitive, I would avoid reading these detailed accounts because I when I read it, it's just like there were a lot of nightmares. Let me leave it at that. So that's in your top five worst ways to die? Yes, exactly. I there's no good way to die, but this is one of the worst ones. Well, sometimes some of the time I want to hear what else fleshes out that top five? But

that's a good that's a good question. I've got to say. It's got to be if you're a tarantula and you're getting slowly eaten by a parasitoid wasp over over the course of a month, when you're paralyzed and it's slowly eating your non essential organs so that you stay alive longer and and nourish it's young longer. But so that's maybe the worst one. But this is a this is a second. Yeah. Yeah, I'm laughing because it makes me nervous,

not because I think it's funny. And one of the one of the real dangers of Chernobyl, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate, is it's not just the energy from the explosion or the radiation immediately from the explosion that washes out and it cools off. You have these, as you said, radioactive contaminants which continue firing little bullets, like little bits of new clear fuel and

byproducts and nuclear reactions. Those are little atoms that are constantly falling apart, and when they fall apart, they shoot off little particles, neutrons and electrons. So it's like, you know, distributing billions and billions of tiny little automatic weapons all over the Earth that are constantly just shooting. And they went up into clouds and floated across the Earth and into Europe, and it was it's a huge tragedy. Yeah, yeah, I mean, in the following decade, there were all this

increase in cancer death. So it was like in the ten years following it, and the number is probably higher than this, but at least fourteen radiation induced cancer deaths occurred, and there was an increase in childhood thyroid cancer near the area. But of course that's just recorded cases. I feel like it's very likely there were more that just

couldn't be traced to Chernobyl. UH. And so the Chernobyl exclusion zone is a thousand square miles, so that's two thousand six d square kilometers where radioactive contamination is high and access is restricted to people because it's it's still dangerous, like you can't you still can't go It's less dangerous than it was thirty years ago, but you still can't go in because, like you said, there are still these things like releasing these this ionizing radiation that can still

get in your body and start knocking around your DNA. I wanted to talk about that that concept of free radicals, which is like I think tossed around a lot, like this idea of like a free radical entering your body, and I hear a lot of stuff like someone's got some pomegranate juice and they're like this is gonna fight free radicals, And it's like, well, what does that even mean? Like what is free radicals? And what are antioxidants and

what does this have to do with radiations? So free radicals actually sounds like a fun thing, like hey man, like free radicals, dude, totally cumular like, But it's basically as as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong. But it's just an uncharged particle that has an unpaired electron and it's it wants to find another electron. M yeah, exactly.

Like an atom is really stable when it's got all the electrons that fill a shell, right, Electrons don't sit on top of each other, they like fill up this ladder of energy levels that's surround the nucleus and uh and and there's specific shells, like there's two electrons in the lower shell than larger numbers and larger numbers. And some atoms are really stable because they have a complete shell, so they're like completely block the charge of the nucleus

and they're totally balanced. And other atoms have like a few electrons hanging out just past the edge of that wall. And if they don't make a complete shell, it's very

easy for those electrons to interact with other atoms. And so for example, when an oxygen molecule which is O two, splits into two individual oxygen atoms, they have these unpaired electrons and become unstable free radicals, and they're always going out there to try to find something else to bond to, right, And that actually happens naturally in the human body through

the process of converting food into energy. So getting like introducing free radicals into the body can be through your environment, but it can be during normal processes, and that we actually have We produce antioxidants to counter free radicals naturally, so we have this system of like, okay, so you you know, we'll be splitting these oxygen molecules in the course of producing a TP converting food into energy, and but as long as we have enough antioxidants that basically

are these little guardians that protect us from the free radicals were okay. So yeah, and you know, sometimes, as we talked about earlier, these free radicals can be produced because of radiation, Like a high energy photon comes in and it knocks off an electron which otherwise would have mail made a really nice cozy ship l for your molecule, and all of a sudden you have a free radical.

And so that's another one of the dangers of radiation, right, And the reason that free radicals are dangerous it's similar to like what we've been mentioning earlier. It's that they're basically careening around disrupting your proteins and lipids in DNA because they're trying to find an electron that will, you know, like you were mentioning, create that complete shell. And it's like, you know, I need an electron to complete me, and I'm going to take it from wherever I can find it,

even if that means like messing up your DNA. So antioxidants actually work by giving free radicals that much needed electron to balance them out. But the problem with giving an electron is that then you can become a free radical yourself, because then you become unbalanced. But the anti accident can actually spare that and remain stable. Uh. And it so it can like say, hey, like don't bob or Mr DNA like where mrs DNA like come to me.

I have some electrons that you can use, and I'm not gonna go crazy just because I gave you an electron like the paramedic of the chemical world, just like going around putting out fires everywhere exactly, or like a trained lifeguard versus someone who doesn't know what they're doing, like saving a drowning person, because if you go and just try to like save a drowning person, they'll like

pull you under. But a lifeguard can go out with a booing and be like, hey, you know, I can I know how to help you without us both getting dragged under here. So if you don't have enough of these antioxidant lifeguards, you can actually you know, that's when bad things happen in your body. So you can actually get free radicals, not just from radiation but from pollution

cigarette smoke. So when you have that imbalance of too many free radicals and not enough antioxidants, you will suffer from what's called oxidative stress, which can play a role in many diseases, anything from cancer to parking sense to Alzheimer's. You're basically messing with your body's molecules at that atomic level, and that is naturally that can cause a lot of problems for your body and is implicated in a lot

of diseases and conditions. None of those diseases are on my top five favorite ways to die either, like they don't sound pleasant, Yeah, what would like? I guess my favorite way to die would be to be eaten by a giant radioactive hamster. But you know, would you then gain that hamster's proportionate strength or whatever? I don't know.

I think it would gain my strengths, like my organizational abilities, because it eats me, right, not how that logic works in comic books at least, you know, comic book physics and biology is totally divorced from reality. But it's fun. No way you lie. Um. Yeah. And and people also should understand that, like radiation comes from all sorts of places. It's not just your Noobyl electronobyl, very bad, very dangerous, but there's radiation everywhere. Like you're getting radiated right now

because there are tracing right now. Yes, oh god, well you know totally pedantically you're listening into this podcast. This podcast is coming to you through acoustic waves. That's radiation that's not gonna damage you, it's not gonna blow off and ionizing radiation, right but there is ionizing radiation right now, like from the sun. You get UV radiation from the sun. There are cosmic rays. These particles from space come down with really high energy and create these like showers of

basically bullets um and they can hit you. And then there's radiation from the ground. There's even radiation from bananas. Like bananas have potassium in them. I knew bananas were up to something. See, that's this is why you don't trust a banana. I don't trust a banana. No, I'm definitely in the anti banana side of that big political discussion. Yeah, no, I'm very anti banana. And now I have confirmations bananas have. Wait, so why do bananas have radiation? Well, they have potassium

in them, and the potassium is radioactive. It decays and so it you know, very gradually shoots off you know, positrons. And if you eat a banana, they used to be like one percent of your average daily exposure to radiation

comes from a banana. But if you took like a truckload of bananas and you try to drive them across the border, then you know, the U s ports they have radiation monitors and they will like, hold on a second, are you smuggling in ten kilos or ten tons of bananas or is that a dirty bomb, you know, And what's the difference really between a banana bomb and a dirty bomb? How many? How many bananas would it take to kill someone? There's so many ways to kill people

with bananas. I mean you lay them out flats of their slippery, you just drop them on the person, or you just I mean through radiation, like like sure you could drown someone in bananas, but I mean like through radiation, like a million bananas. Would that do it? A billion bananas? Yeah, if you spend a day with a billion bananas, that would seriously increase your cancer risk. So that's officially not recommended from the physics point of one day, a billion

bananas writing that down no reason. But you know, if you take an airplane trip, that's a lot more radiation because this radiation that comes from space, it's mostly attenuated by the atmosphere. The atmosphere is like a huge blanket that protects us. But you go upen an airplane, there's much less atmosphere between you and space. So like flight attendants and pilots, they get cancer a lot more than other people. Yeah, I didn't really think about that, but

that makes total sense. So if you fly on a plane, you should not eat bananas, not only because the smell is offensive to me, but also it's bad to compound your radiation unless you're hoping to create the mega hamster death monster, in which case you should eat a lot of bananas and flying a lot of airplanes in order

to eat bananas, right, exactly, exactly. Well, So when we get back, we're actually going to keep talking about chernobyl, but we're gonna talk about how animals are affected by chernobyl. Because even though there are all these signs and fences and all these signs in Russian that tell you to stay away because it's very dangerous, animals don't pay attention to signs at Russian. They just go right ahead. So we're gonna find out how these animals have been adapting

to chernobyl. Since antioxidants are so great at protecting your body from free radicals, should you start taking antioxidant supplements. Well, it's good to have a very diet rich in nutrients that have antioxidant properties, such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, and more. But you have to be careful with supplements, vitamins, or any product making big promises about its antioxidant benefits.

Unless you're planning to live in space for a while or somewhere else you'll be exposed to high amounts of radiation. You can probably get plenty of antioxidants from a healthy diet. You also want to eat a veraiety of healthy food so you can get different types of antioxidants that help your body in different ways. I know it's the boring, not fun answer, but supplements, unfortunately have not been found to be able to do the job of these healthy habits.

Research has been muddled and there's been no clear evidence showing that antioxidant supplements do anything to help prevent disease such as cancer. Additionally, taking antioxidant supplements is not without risk. There are some studies indicating that taking too much beta keratin from supplements may increase the risk of lung cancer and smokers, and two high doses of vitamin E from

supplements may increase the risk of stroke and prostate cancer. So, unless you've been directed to take these supplements by your doctor, your best and safest bet is to eat healthy fruit, veggies, nuts, and so on. I know I'm not your mom, I can't tell you what to do, and I'm being a total nag but come on, eat a vegetable. Your comes the broccoli trained to to. When we return, we're going to talk about some birds who have managed to adapt to the chair Nobile exclusion zone. Is it because they

eat their vegetables spoilers? No, not really. It's no secret that I admire birds. Their audacious, adorable, feathery little dinosaurs, and while they can be spectacular survivors, they're simultaneously vulnerable. Noise pollution can interfere with bird's abilities to find mates and communicate. Pesticides weaken and kill off birds in great numbers. Deforestation and drought is radically impacting many species of birds. Some of the most iconic and endangered birds species are

being impacted by humans and surprising ways. Endangered California condor chicks are being killed by litter that their parents mistake for food to feed them. Birds face a lot of chan o lounges, primarily from humans mucking around with our environment, but sometimes birds are able to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, such as the deadly contaminated waste lamp of the chair

Noble Exclusion Zone, turning radioactive lemons into lemonade. I want to preface this by telling everyone don't go and take Instagram photos near Chernobyl. I think it is. That's like good advice, right, it's good advice. I just don't do anything near Chernobyl. Eat bananas, take photos, walk your hamster. None of that stuff is a good idea, right exactly.

There was like a brief trend, and I feel like this was probably overblown, like probably only a couple of people did it, and then it was like, oh, it's this big trend. But still some people went over to Chernobyl and took like Instagram photos because of the TV show. Its like, but didn't you watch the TV show? I think again, it's a testament to like the weird invisible nature, like sneak in there. You don't get shot immediately, you don't die immediately, you don't feel it, your skin doesn't

crisp up or anything great. Um, and so you just feel like, oh, it's probably fine. But it's it's like playing like time delayed Russian roulette, Like maybe you'll go and you will cancer, but maybe you will get cancer in ten years and you'll never know if it was because you ate that banana or winter Chernobyl. It's time delayed to invisible Russian roulette with like thousands or millions

of tiny bullets. But animals, they are happy enough to play Russian Roulette, especially if it means escaping from humans. So researchers have been checking out like what's been happening in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone because again because humans can't live there, and poaching is very restricted because if you go and poach there, not only is it like ecologists

want to restrict poaching, but for people's health. Like if you poach an animal that's been exposed to radiation, guess what you're exposing yourself and whoever you're giving the animal to also to radiation. It's not you know, you once that animal eats something that has like some radioactive contamination, then the animal is contaminated, and then if you eat that animal, then you're contaminated. So it's not because these

things last a long time. They're going to be there for decades or thousands of years, depending on the on the element. And also they spread, like one little atom shoots off a bullet, it can hit another atom and then make it radioactive. And it's not just something where it's like the poison dilutes eventually, you know, it just keeps firing bullets. It really is weird because it is

similar to a virus. Now we're talking about actual molecules actually, like on the atomic level, it's not like it's not a virus, which is you know, a bunch of molecules that has formed into basically a structure that replicates, but it is it behaves in a way that is somewhat similar in that it can create Basically, it's like quote unquote offspring radioactive particles. So you can think of it as like propagating itself. So you know, we don't we

don't count that as life. I don't like there's a lot of debate about whether we even count viruses as life. But it is interesting when it's like you don't think of particles as being able to propagate or have offspring, but they absolutely can't. Now that's true. Particles turned into other particles and atoms can trigger the same reaction and

other atoms. Um. I've never actually thought about whether, um, you know, a particle is alive, but some people a lot of people ask us questions on our podcast, like what's it like to be a photon? You know, if you're traveling the universe at the speed of light, what is it like? And and it's a fun philosophical question but totally unanswerable. Um yeah, I mean it's the question of what life is like. It's still like, you know, the argument is still stuck at like, well, virus isn't

technically alive or is it? You know, so it's it's kind of a it is a tricky question to answer. I think it's it's it's one of those things that I think science and philosophy sort of like butt up against, where it's like at a certain point it becomes a philosophical question not a scientific one. But yeah, it is I would say, like in terms of like biologists would say, like no particles are not alive, that's that does not count as life. But well, I agree with biologists on

that one. But but I feel like some of these questions you have to wonder, like what is the point of asking the question? What are you trying to get at? Because you know, are you really learning anything? It seems to me a lot like the Pluto controversy, like is Pluto a planet or a dwarf planet? Like it doesn't change anything about the universe. If you give it this label or that label. So what does it matter if viruses are called alive or not? In the end, it's

an artificial distinction. We can argue about how to apply it, but we don't learn anything by deciding one day that we're gonna call them alive or not. You know, it's all We're all one anyway, It's all one big quantum field hippy, All right, settled? No, But I think it's true.

I think it's true. I think that it's if you can think, if it helps to think about a particle as having a personality, it's that's fine if it helps you learn about it, as long as you realize, like when I say a particle wants an electron, it's not wanting it in the same way that a human wants a donut, but it may be the way that it acts like a human that's ravenous for a donut is similar. Where human will knock down boxes and like shove people through aisles to get to that donut. In a particle

that needs an electron will do the same thing. So if those, if those kind of comparisons help you understand it better, it's that's good. But just you know, particles don't necessarily want stuff or do things like a human or even an animal does. But what is interesting is how animals have been adapting to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. And again, I think it's when we think about adaptation.

Sometimes it's easy to think about it in human terms of like you, you personally can adapt to a tough situation by making decisions, like you know, everyone's adapting to staying at home right now. But if you're an animal and you're adapting, that doesn't necessarily mean that you, the individual animal, is within your lifetime adapting to something. So these birds that have been studied are adapting, but not

necessarily within one bird's lifetime. So these researchers have been collecting feather and blood samples from a variety of bird species within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and they found that the birds that have been living in areas with higher contamination actually have more antioxidants to fight free radicals than they encounter that that they will encounter in the exclusion zone.

And so obviously, like we talked about before, having those antioxidants is really important if you are, say, living in an area where you're going to get this high dose, relatively high dose of radiation. And so what the confusing thing is that there may actually be a evolutionary benefit to these birds that are actually in the higher contaminated

areas versus the slightly lower contaminated areas. So in a study published in it's called cher Nobles Birds adapting to ionizing radiation, researchers found that oxidative stress and DNA damage decreased as background radiation contamination increased within the cher Noble zone, which sounds really counterintuitive. And this again another another preface here. That doesn't mean you should go bathe in radiation, that

doesn't mean radiation is good for you. And this happened after several generations of selection, right, This is like, these are the ones that survived found some way to benefit from this situation. This is not like all the birds that wandered in got some boost. This is not your new SPA treatment, right exactly. So these birds are going through adaptations, meaning birds with higher levels of antioxidants are surviving and those who don't have those are dying off.

And you, a human, are going to be in that dying off category. And when birds die of radation poisoning, do they have the same horrible effects. Is it like in the top five ways for birds to not die, to have their feathers fall off and stuff. I mean, I can't speak to what it's like to be a dying bird, but I it affects basically all animals bodies in a similar way that if it affects humans unless you have some natural resistance to it or evolved resistance

to it. So that the result of this is where it's like the birds and needs like higher contaminated areas is very It's like, oh, wait, so they're getting higher doses of radiation. Why are they actually doing better than birds that are in still within chernobyl but in lower contaminated areas, And so that's a it's kind of a conundrum.

But what could be the reason for this is if you're in an area where it's like more binary whether you live or die, So if you don't have those really high levels of antioxidants, that high level of protection, you just die. Whereas if you're in a slightly lower area where you live long enough to reproduce perhaps but you're kind of not as healthy and you like eventually do die, then you may not necessarily be pressured to

actually have those those really high level of antioxidants. So like, if you're a bird, it's like, okay, I'm getting I mean like this really dangerous zone. I only live long enough to reproduce if I have extremely high levels of antioxidants like and enough that it's almost like overkill that it's really protecting me. But you know, if you're a burden sort of the it's still not good. It's still not a great area to live in, but you can kind of get away with not having those high levels

long enough to reproduce. Maybe overall you're not as healthy because you're kind of like you're just kind of squeaking by and you you don't actually you aren't being as quickly, like the evolution isn't working as quickly on you. The the that selective pressure of the radiation, so you're it's like, well I managed to have babies and now my wing is falling off. But like so it's it's kind of counterintuitive, but a result like this doesn't mean oh, radiation is

good for animals. It just shows that complex process of evolution, especially when you have this short period of time with an incredible selective pressure. That is something we don't really see very often, which is an immense amount of radiation that would not normally happen unless we had turned very suddenly.

And isn't there also a cost, like the reason you have these antioxidants, which can you know, put out the flames of your radiation or your you know, savior drowning molecules you use, your analogy must come at some other cost, otherwise all animals would have it all the time. Yeah. Yeah, it actually comes at the cost of production of types

of melanins. So a lot of birds will want to have these really well again, not necessarily want to, but they have these vibrant colors, they have a lot of melanin production, and if you they actually have to trade off that melanin production to have that high level of antioxidants, and not having that melanin can affect their health and how they socialize and like sexual selection as well. So

you're absolutely right. It's not like, hey, why don't we all just like get huge amounts of antioxidants so we can live right next to cher nobyle. It's a very complex thing and one that researchers are still trying to figure out right now. So this is like one result of a bunch of studies that are trying to figure out,

like what is going on with these irradiated birds. We don't know necessarily, right, And so the in the region where the contamination is sort of lower, and the birds that don't have these protections can survive, then it's still a disadvantage to have all those protections because it comes at all these other costs, right, right, And I think and now this is me speculating, and I'm not sure, but I do think I saw that there is a higher incidence of albinism in birds in this area, which

would make sense because if we're talking about melanin production being affected by antioxidants, well, that may be protecting them from the radiation somewhat. But being albino as an animal is not always good for your survival. It makes you more visible to predators. So it's like, that's why we don't see a bunch of like you may see an albino squirrel once in your lifetime, but it's hard to spot them because they actually get picked off pretty quickly

because they're so visible. So if you're a bird and you're you are subject to being preyed upon by other like other birds or say like the fox and the wolf populations there. Then you don't necessarily want to be like, hey, look at me. I'm like I'm I look like Liberaci And it's great. That's right. Every one of these mutations has lots of others effects. You can't just like turn one thing up or down. And evolution is not one dimensional.

It's not like, Okay, today we're selecting for radiation. Tomorrow we're doing it for color. It's all or nothing, like either living or dying. Yeah, evolution is not character creation sliders unfortunately, But wouldn't that be great? I'd like some more hit points and some more wisdom. Um. I think the cool thing about this, the mutations that create protection against radiation, is where do those mutations come from? Maybe from radiation, right, So it's like radiation is triggered protection

against radiation. So like meta radiation is really running a racket here. It's making money on both sides. It's like it's like that old Gary Larson cartoon where it's like a brick thrown through someone's window and there's a little note on the brick said bricks through your window. Call Oh, But it's like a bunch of tiny invisible bricks in the window, is your DNA Again, I want to reiterate, like you might think like from this one, so I like, oh,

is radiation good for animals a good selective pressure. No, that's not not something that you can conclude from that. And there's been a lot of research, a lot of debate amongst conservation is how animals are actually doing in the exclusion zone. So you might hear stories about how animal populations are actually increasing in the exclusion zones, and like there's a study published in in Frontiers in Ecology

and the Environment that found large mammal population. So like gray wolves, raccoon dogs, and wars, their populations are actually slowly increasing in the exclusion zone despite the contamination. That doesn't mean that contamination is good for them. It means that humans are even worse than the radioactive contamination. It's that our lack of presence there is enough of a boost for them to basically have an increase their population.

Even though I bet, now you know, I'm not a nuclear physicist, but I bet if like they had that area without the radiation poisoning, they'd be doing even better. Probably you need the radiation poisoning to drive all the humans away, so you know, overall, I mean, it sounds like you're making the argument that overall is in that wind because damage the animals, but you damage the humans more. It's sort of like radiation treatment for cancer, right, you

kill the tumor and were situation. I mean, I think I try to take a somewhat human positive perspective, where yes, it's true that the radiation is keeping us out. I think that the lesson we should learn from this is not, oh, let's blow up a bunch of nuclear reactors so that we have these animal conservation areas. I think it's that, oh, animal populations are so resilient. If we just gave them some more space and matt with author radiation, imagine how

good they do. Like it's it's they are very they're very resilient, but they need just a little bit of help to bouts back after like all the Shenanigans were basically doing as humans. It's amazing to me how rapidly they can respond. You know that that to immediate like dramatic, short time scale catastrophes, they can come back and they can thrive. You know, we imagine like very slow climate change edging a population towards having heavier coats or thinner coats,

or taller or shorter. But also if you have enough diversity in your population, even a shock, right, as long as some of them survived, then they can thrive in that environment. It's it's incredible. And also it he tells you about the importance of diversity, right, yes, exactly, and the importance of genetic diversity, which I think is something that it's like, we think about biodiversity in terms of different species, but it all so means like diversity within

a population. So if you start to limit their genetic diversity, they can't adapt to these shocks because they just don't have a big enough genetic library to have, you know, an offspring that's like, hey, I've got like a billion antioxidants. Come at me, RAI. Because it's not, as you said before, it's not really adapting. It's not like they're like, Okay, here's the problem, what are we gonna do about it. It's just like some of us die and some of

us survive, and that's it. That's the adaptation. Right. So if you're a monoculture like corn is, then you've got no chance, right Yeah, Yeah, I love it if like there were bird scientists with their bird lab coats, like with a white board and they're going like, okay, what do we do, Like here's the situation. Unfortunately that's just not the case. I love it, that's that's my head canon. Birds, bird scientists trying to make antioxidants. But well then you

might enjoy it. You know, there was an opportunity for dinosaurs to save themselves because the media that came and wiped out the dinosaurs. It made a near miss past the earth, but ten years earlier they could have seen it in the sky. So if those din if those dino scientists had been you know, on their game, they had enough warning to do something about it. Well, you see.

The problem though, was the top dinosaur scientists was a t rex and he had these little half from glasses and he was trying to reach the blackboard, but his arms were so too tiny to make it, like like, professor Munchie, we can't see your writing because your arms are too small. And then he got mad and ate all the students and then you know, yeah, well that cleared that cleared the you know, that cleared the playing field for mammal scientists. So here we are exactly, a

little little shrew like animals with lab coats exactly. You can actually type up grand proposals and submit them. And that's why we survived. That is adaptation right there. You may be wondering, if birds can adapt to high levels of radioactive contamination, why couldn't humans. Well, technically we might

be able to after many generations and many deaths. And of course that's not even speaking of the quality of life, which doesn't sound so great and is one of the many reasons it's important not to contaminate the planet with radiation. The thing about humans is that we've got to trick

up our sleeves when it comes to selective pressures. Instead of adapting our bodies through trial and air, which means a lot of dying, we can use our huge, ungainly brains to build society, science, medicine, and ideas that can help save our butts. For instance, sunscreen. The sun attacks us on a daily basis with pesky uvy radiation, and instead of waiting to evolve some hippo skin that produces a thick sweat which acts as a natural sunscreen, we just create our own out of zinc and it comes

in fun fruity sense. So when people talk about humans evolving or adapting, I wouldn't necessarily count on our survival by waiting around to evolve a set of gills or some kind of internal radioactive shield. It's going to be our ability to cooperate, our pro social behavior and scientific discoveries that saves us. Or you know, we could steal d NA for organisms that actually have their crap together.

We'll discuss whether that's even possible when we return. In almost every apocalyptic movie, the heroes are gritty, war toughened people with robot arms and nine o'clock shadows and spiky shoulder pads. But in the event of an earth blasting apocalypse or not necessarily the most likely animal or living creature to survive. So let me introduce you to a couple of organisms that are definitely gonna kick mad Max is sorry, but so Daniel. I imagine you've actually probably

heard of tartar grades before. I have. I love tartar grades. They're amazing. I I thought you would like them, so we've actually talked about them on the show before. But I'm gonna go even more in depths on these incredible little they're also called water bears. They are also called moss piglets. They are they have adorable names, and I think they look super cute too. What I mean, if you've seen one, like really zoomed in, it looks sort of like a horrible monster, I mean, but a cute one.

They're like a little nyoki with eight legs, with hooks on each leg and a little like whole buzz saw for our mouth. I think that's cute. Well, you know when they evolve into like actually literally bear sized objects on the moon and then come down and take over, I'm gonna come and ask you if you think they're cute. I mean, they'll be our overlords, so I'll say yes. Obviously you'll have to. You'll have to. It's the law. So they are one of the toughest little animals in

the world. And they are animals. They're teeny tiny, and it's hard to sometimes like think of these like really really tiny microscopic organisms as being animals and not like bacteria or something. But they are animals. How small are they? I mean, are we talking like really microbe size? Are we talking that you could like see one on your fingertips.

You can almost see it with the human eye. If you have really good eyesights, like if if you had a really big one and you had it like in a dish of water, maybe you could see like the tiniest, tiniest spec but I think typically you can only see it under a microscope. So they are about point three to point five millimeters long, which is point two inches, and I think that's kind of hard to visualize, like

what that's like. So if you imagine like a grain of salt, I think four or five of them could stand on one side of a grain of salt, So they're they're small. I'm imagining like literally hiding behind a grain of salt, like ducking behind a grain of salt. You move a grain of salt, and then you zoom in on them, and they're like, we're just hanging out here smoking. They're all smoking cigarettes behind the grain of Tartar grades are supposed to be in class. What are

you doing? Oh no, it's the principle. That's our new TV show. We're pitching right Tartar grade elementary school, exact baby Tartar grade babies and they're they're in high school. Yeah, I may be one of the toughest animals in the world, but you broke my heart. Yes please, So they are found all over the world. They're found on moss, lichen, they're found in soil, dead leaves, sediment, in water, basically anywhere that they can have, just like even a little

bit of moisture, they can be found. So they're also found in extreme environments like hot springs under polar ice and boiling mud volcanoes which aren't actual volcanoes, but it's just like boiling churning mud as like these hot gases erupted like this mud comes out. But they can be there if they want it seems it seems like a fun place to be, like a little tarte grade spa.

So they like moist environments. But like I said, they can basically survive if they can retain a little bit of moisture, and they can also survive being dehydrated, so they can live through environments that should kill them by turning themselves into living mummies. So they are actually capable of self embalming, so they desiccate, they dry themselves out, and then the problem with turning yourself into a mummy or freezing yourself is that you will explode yourself like

you'll damage yourselves. So like when you're when you're frozen, and then it's not the freezing that necessarily kills you, it's the thawing because as you thought out, these ice crystals form in your cells and basically they're like little Sharken's that explode yourselves. So that's gets bigger as it freezes, right, and so the cell wall that can't get bigger. It's frozen insane, right exactly exactly, so you explode. That sounds bad, It's that's definitely on my list of top five ways

to not die. Yeah, So if if all Disney's head really was frozen, like you know, it's probably fine right now. But if we tried to thought out like this some internet conspiracy theory I'm not aware of. Yeah, uh, there's like a theory that Walt Disney froze his own head, Like I don't think it's true, was his own head, Like yeah, that would be that would be funny, like like a chicken that got its head chopped off, just

enough time to get your head or something. Tartar grades have found a way to not explode when they are falling after being frozen, and also to survive being dried out. And extreme temperatures, so they will cover their internal cells, organelles and membranes and a special sugar gel called trehos, which is it's basically like this this material that keeps it from getting frozen, from getting overheated, or from getting

dried out. And so it works to such a great extent that labs have revived tartar grade samples up to forty years later, and there are reported to amples of dehydrated tartar grades that were taken from like one hundred year old museum moss and and successfully revived. But I don't know if that's been able to be replicated or if that's just kind of an apocryphal story, but it's maybe.

It's pretty amazing. And you know, tartar grades are also unusual because they're one of the few animals that are on the Moon right now, that's true, didn't we we left some behind, right we crash landed. The Israeli's sent a lander up there with some tartar grades on it and it crashed, and so like, there are literally tartar grades on the Moon. We don't know what they're doing.

They're probably frozen, but you know, a little bit of maybe like a comet hits the moon or a little asteroid some water in it, and you could have momentarily living Targetar colony. Yeah, exactly from which to launch their eventual invasion onto Earth. Right, we've given them a foothold. I like to imagine they're all Matt Damon's in that movie, what was that movie called The Mars One the Martian Matt Damon's on Mars Martian. I thought it was called, Oh,

Matt Damon's on Mars, That's what I call it. But yeah, a bunch of little Matt Damon's like making potatoes out of their own poop. But yeah, that that'll probably happen eventually. So they can serve they can potentially survive being on the Moon, at least for a while. So they can survive temperatures of down to negative four fifty eight degrees fahrenheit, which is negative two two degrees celsius. They can survive temperatures up to three hundred degrees fahrenheit, which is a

hundred and fifty degrees celsius. So you know, if we tried to do that, we die. I would certainly die. Yes, even though they are super extreme, they're technically not extreme aphiles because they can merely tolerate extreme environments and not specifically thrive in them, which I think is kind of a silly distinction, like, oh, okay, you can survive like three hundred degrees fahrenheit, but you're not extreme enough for me. Well,

you know, sciences filled with these silly distinctions. You know your planet, you're not a planet. You and extreme a file. You're just totally awesome and crazy. Scientists are just like middle school clicks. I'm sorry, no, I'm kidding. I love scientists, but it's sometimes sometimes a little bit. So despite the fact that they're not technically classified as extreme aphiles, they can actually survive the vacuum of space for up to

ten days. So in two thousand and seven, researchers exposed tartar grades to the vacuum of space and then they reeled them back in again. Like, no, they didn't have tiny little microscopic space suits for them to wear. They were just like floating out there, and over two thirds of them were revived. So two thirds of them survived, the majority of them, and they were piste off probably right,

they were Superman. They're like, dude, bro, what what the hell is a question like when you do experiments on animals, you always have to get some sort of like you know, ethics reviews, like is this suffering and doing to this and will going to yield some valuable science? Does that also extended Tardi grades because there are, as you say, little animals like probably I would imagine it does. Hey,

guys actually looked this up after recording. It turns out most invertebrates are excluded from animal research ethics laws which define animals as vertebrates. What the heck? Well, this mindset might be slowly changing. In two thousand and four, the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia change their guidelines to include cephalopods such as octopuses and squid. Anyways, I was surprised to learn this. Now, back to my

conversation with Daniel. While it's true that insects and probably tartar grades, as much as I love them, can't really it's not that they can't necessarily feel pain, but they don't. Their brains are so simple that it's hard to know like what suffering is to them, Like they are at that point, they're kind of like little robots, and like we subject robots to all sorts of things which may be bad. Maybe the robots and the tartar grades are going to like form an alliance and like stick it

to us horrible humans. But yeah, I actually do think all I would have to check on it, But I do think you do have to still go through that process because it is an animal, it's a living thing. You might not have to do that with bacteria because it's bacteria. Nobody cares, right, no, exactly, my wife kills slaughters bacteria. But you know, tend to the nine every day in your experiments. But tartar grades, there are animals.

So somebody out there is like, you know, thought about what is it like to be a tartar grade, and uh, hey maybe I hope it's fun until you get shot at into space as part of the experiment at least. Yeah, And unfortunately, actually, of those that survived, many of them did die soon after, but not before they were able to reproduce. So evolution calls that a win, like evolution

calls that success story success right there, right. And so the reason that I bring up tartar grades is not just because they're awesome at space and cold and getting dried out, but it's when they're in space, like that's full of radiation, right, Like you're getting bombarded, like you were saying, with cosmic rays from the Sun. You're because

we're you're not protected by the atmosphere. That's right. The Sun pumps out a huge amount of course of light but also just a raw particle, so protons and electrons streaming out a crazy high speeds. It's called the solar wind, and it's pretty dangerous. So astronauts, for example, when they go up into space, they get a big dose of radiation and and sometimes it's it fluctuates a lot, so the Sun could just like have a big solar storm and pump out enormous amounts of radiation that would kill

you almost instantly. And so in the International Space Station they have special room that's that's lined with extra protecting so when a solar storm is coming, they basically run to the basement, you know, like in Kansas with the tornado and hiding that specially protected room. Otherwise they're almost literally toast. Oh my god, that's I'm surprised that Hollywood hasn't like picked up on that space station panic room. That's the second Netflix pitch. We came up with today,

quimby get back to us. No, but space is filled with radiation. Absolutely, we are safe here under our atmosphere, but out there in space is a dangerous environment. Yeah. But for tartar grades, they actually have a surprising defense mechanism even when they're in space and when they're exposed to radiation. So tartar grades have a protective protein that

shields them from radiation damage from ionizing radiation. It's called damage suppressor or d s UP, which sounds like hey, d s up sounds like a really cool, like, hey, I can survive being radical because I got de s up. So it is a protein that serves as armor to the tartar grades d n A. So it's thought that it maybe acts as kind of like it's similar to

antioxidants and that it can sorb free radicals. But it is different in that it like actually kind of clusters around the d n A and actually forms a literal shield. So the result is that tartar grades can withstand many times more ionizing radiation than other animals. They can actually tolerate almost a thousand times more gamma radiation than a human, like an amount of radiation that when pumped into a human would kill kill us, like within a couple of weeks,

Like the tartar grade could actually survive. And so you're saying it acts like sort of a physical shield. It's like repels, it absorbs and repels the radiation. It's a pretty recent discovery, so I think some of the evidence is that it's actually absorbing these the free radicals and the radiation. So it's like, okay, you're trying to get an electron and then it just like absorbs it. Do you think it makes it like a puke pu sound when it bounces, It just bounces off it could it could?

I think it does seem like beyond just acting as an antioxidant, is it is actually forming a physical shield that prevents it from getting to the DNA because it's so it's like clustered around the DNA rather than just like floating around and acting as like a lifeguard, it's

just forming this cluster around it. So we don't we shouldn't just be jealous of tartar grades, although it is a natural response because they are the coolest animal, but they the discovery of de SUP may actually end up helping humans sometime in the future, maybe the distant future,

who knows. But human kidney cells were engineered to be able to produce tartar grade de s UP, and those cells in studies actually suffered about fifty less DNA damage caused by X rays compared to cells without d s ups. So again, that doesn't mean we can just like get a syringeful of tartar grades and inject it and now

you're like immune to radiation. Like it's it's a lot of steps between creating a kidney cell that can create this this protein and actually having a human who can create this protein in your body that protects your body from radiation. But it's really cool. It's like a step in that direction. Well, that's going to be important when we eventually have to rise up and overthrow our tartar grade overlords, Right, so it's good get started now on

this kind of science. That's true. That's true. Or when we're kicked off Earth and we have to colonize another planet that doesn't have a great atmosphere, so we need

some resistance. But yeah, it would be great like if we could give say astronauts like this decept protein, like get their selves to produce it, like it would offer them protection maybe not from a blast from a solar winds, but like the because like their cancer risk it's probably higher than you know, the average earth bound human because of all of the radiation they're getting. But yeah, it's it's again, it's not like we're not like a year

away from having tartar grade human eyebreds. But it's it's a cool it's a cool discovery that maybe eventually we could figure out how to introduce this protective protein to our own DNA. It must have some cost, right, Like tartar grades manufacture this thing to protect themselves, but it must cost them energy or slow down their DNA replication or something, right, isn't there a cost associated? Yeah, and I'm not sure because this is a relatively recent discovery.

I'm not sure what like what the cost is. But usually if there, if it's something that it seems like, well, this has seems to have you know, countless kind of benefit, like there could be some costs, but it could also be Targar grades are really interesting in that they are capable of a lot of horizontal gene transfer, so they can collect they steal a lot of DNA essentially, and so it may be because they are able to steal and like borrow so much DNA that they can have

this like two good to be true defense mechanisms that in terms of human evolution, like if we tried that kind of shenanigans early on in our evolution in the way that our evolutionary path has been, it may have just ended up hurting us more than helping us. So it's like something where yeah, there may be a cost to say like an animal like a human, that there isn't like that cost is not as bad for the

Tartar grade. And so if what's interesting about like trying to engineer this for humans is that we can potentially try to take the benefits and then mitigate the costs. But that's really hard. That's something that takes probably decades to figure out. Time to get started, time to get started everyone, time to get crack it. It It sounds like a great grand proposal right there, Tartar grade human hybrids.

It'll take a while, so we better start now preparing so before we go, I feel like we can't end the podcast without at least mentioning the baddest, rattiest radio resistor extremophile Dino Caucus radio duran's Have you heard of this bacteria? Actually have heard of this because my wife is a microbiologist here you see, Irvine, and so she's a big fan of the microbes and uh and what they can do and the amazing things they can do with all their extra copies of their DNA. It's a

it's pretty clever. Yes, Now did I pronounce that right? Can you get your wife? I have no expertise in pronouncing bacteriological names. Unfortunate. Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm like, you know, I learned it from reading, so I don't know. It sounds right to me. But it's also nicknamed conan the bacterium, So that's that's pretty cool. Maybe that's what I'll call it from name especial party exactly. So it is one of the toughest bacteria in the world and probably one

of the toughest living organism ms in the world. So it is a spherical bacterium that usually travels in groups of four kind of clustered together, so it looks like a little lucky four leaf clover. And so here's a question that I actually have for you. So grays is a unit used to measure radiation. Right there, are lots of units to measure radiation. When we use units, it's like only useful, like when we think about it in

terms of how it's relative to another thing. Right, So like we're so for now, I'm going to use this unit because it's the only unit I know about, and it's what I'm going to use to compare these things. But it's kind of arbitrary that I'm using this unit. It's just like like, here's a unit to demonstrate how tough these bacteria are, but the fact I'm actually using

this like is not significant at all. So, and these units, these units are all interrelated, like a gray is equal to a hundred rats, and a rat is a radiation absorbed dose, which means like hundred ergs per gram. It tells you like how much energy is being absorbed by your body. Right, And they're all like I think Grays

was like named after a guy that like made the discovery. Right, So it's it's not like because when I saw grays, I thought I was like, oh, is it like g rays like gamma rays, But no, it's just like named after guy name, last name was great. Yeah, this is just their nicknames. Like gamma radiation is actually just a guy that went by like gray Hey. But yeah, so I'm just using it kind of like just to give

a frame of reference. Um, So, human exposed to about five grays of radiation will typically die within a couple of weeks cher Nobil style. So tartar grades, which we just talked about, can survive around four thousand grays of radiation with some damage to its reproductive capabilities, which is kind of nitpicking at this point because they're still alive. The ConA and the bacterium or D radio durans can survive around five thousand grades of radiation with almost no

ill effects. So that's a thousand times about what a human can survive. And when I say what a human can survive, I imagine if you're getting like five grades of radiation, that means you die within two weeks. Less than that means you're probably going to get cancer within the year. It's not like this is the happy Yeah, survive is a loose definition. Them survived there. So the D radio durans are conan. The barbarian can also sometimes survive up to fifteen thousand grades. So that's ten thousand

times more than a human. Now, when I say sometimes survive. It's like, uh, it sometimes doesn't, so it's like, but but sometimes it can survive. That. So the fact like if you got a group of humans together and shot fifteen grades at them, all dead like that. No, big, big, no, big no, do not do that. People don't do it. It's amazing. My wife is always telling me how microbes

can survive anything. You know, they're essentially almost impossible to wipe out because in there there's always one that has some crazy strategy for how to handle this situation. So how did you behind a grain of salt? All? So how did these microbes do it? What is the mechanism? Do they have a shield the way Tarte grades have or they just dodging those radiation bullets or what's going on? Well, it's actually something that you mentioned earlier. So they have

redundant DNA and extremely fast DNA repair mechanisms. So they're basically like little wolverines. So as the ionizing radiation breaks down, it's d NA. Not only does it have redundant DNA, so it's like, hey, I have like several backups, so no sweat. It also is able to build back up the damaged DNA. Really quickly, So as these little tiny bullets are like blasting into the DNA, it's like, hey, you know, I'll just build that again. I got backups, No big deal. Everything is sink to drop box, so

you know, deleted all you like exactly. It's like every little sister's horror story of like a big brother that's so fast at rebuilding his legos that you can't knock it down fast enough and he just like keeps rebuilding. It is that a personal story, no, no, no, no, general societal experience. What's interesting is that there is a little bit of evidence that suggests that it may have

stolen some of these capabilities from eukaryotic self. So bacteria are not eukaryotes, they aren't in the same domain as animals and plants. It actually may have gotten some eukaryotic DNA through horizontal transfer of genes, so like basically, if you're a little bacteria and you swallow up some foreign DNA, you can actually incorporate that into your own DNA, and like that may have had a role in being able to have these really fast repair mechanisms, and so it's

it's very interesting. It's kind of a similar story to the tartar grade where it's like, you know, just like if you if you borrow DNA from a bunch of different animals, like sometimes you can find or not even animals. It doesn't have to be an actual animal, but if you borrow DNA from other organisms, ones that you are not even remotely related to, it can actually benefit you. So it's it's just mediated through viruses and pages like

the injecting new bits of DNA. It can it definitely can be Sometimes it's just directly these bacteria like engulfing something, but it can be mediated by by viruses injecting it into their things. Like basically if you get it in and the bacteria is different from an animal cell or even like a plant cell where it's like basically they just have all their stuff floating around like a big cell, and so if they can get that in there, they can potentially use it. Most of the time, it's not

going to be useful for them. But again, bacteria reproduce that an incredible race. They've been around for hundreds of millions of years. Sorry, probably billions, billions, billions of years. I'm so bad at like time scale, and I'm like they've been around for thousands of years now, but they've

been around for billions of years. They reproduced so quickly that this is one of the reasons they can evolve these incredible survival strategies that seem really improbable because they've just had and so many opportunities to have this happen. And then if something bad happens, like they get a they eat a bad piece of DNA, or they have a bad mutation, no sweat, there's like millions of new bacteria ready to to take over and try again. So yeah,

it's it is. This is why, like I think when we're like, well, why is like why is bacteria just like so hardy and so good. It's like they just they have an incredible capability of reproducing and um have lived for such a long time that they can basically

cope with anything. They can eat almost anything. My wife tells me this story about how they were trying to scrub bacteria and microbes from the outside of various satellites and spaceships because they don't want to contaminate you know, Mars or the moon whatever with human life, and so they're spraying it with some stuff, some bleach stuff to kill everything, and they discover that it killed everything except for some new kind of microbe they haven't never seen

before that eat bleach and it's like, yum, feed me more of that, you know. And you know they're microbes living on the outside of the International Space Station. And uh, to imagine like ever ridding the world of microbes seems impossible. Microbe just being like a kids, It's okay, it's safety bleach. No, don't listen to him. The one microbe that believed Donald Trump about that one. Yeah, hey, nanny's right, it's totally cool. He's wearing like a dirty tank top. That's how I

imagine this, like sleeves bag microbe. Yeah, it's it's a very incredible. It's like when you think about, well, well, why can't humans just have these crazy adaptations, Why why can't we just have DNA that protects itself from radiation. Well, like you know, we've been around very short amount of time on Earth. We haven't typically had to deal with huge amounts of radiation until recently, like oops, that might have been on us too when we started to tinker

around on the sub atomic level. And and these these backup copies they cost right to have, like extra strands your DNA and all these repair mechanisms that slow things down. It costs a lot of energy, and so you could have it, but then you wouldn't have as much energy to run away from predators or you know, fight against disease.

And so we're sort of tuned to the amount of radiation we naturally get here on Earth, and actually repairing DNA has a cost to like because every time you repair DNA there could be like a mistake paid, so there could be a mutation, which a lot of Again, most mutations are either neutral or bad. So you know, uh, it's while we need mutations to evolve. It's kind of like the thing that right now people are hearing like, oh, you know, the one of virus mutates that's going to

make the virus better. Not always like mutations just happen. That doesn't necessarily mean that's going to be good for the virus. Let me take your computer code and you just randomly replace one piece with another piece. It's not going to work better usually, right, usually just going to break. And so yeah, exactly, but like you do you reiterate that, like you know, millions of times over billions of years, Like eventually you're going to get basically a bacteria that

eats bleach. Right, And and as you were saying, these things reproduce so quickly that the search scale is so fast because they have generation after generation after generation, and we're still like raising the first batch of kids, right, so our response time is pretty slow. Yeah, and we're one of the longest living animals on Earth. There are some animals that can outlive us, but they're they're quite rarely. Evolution really does seem to favor sort of these shorter lifespans,

more frequent reproduction. But we just happened to find the evolutionary niche that favors longer lifespan, fewer offspring. But we make up for it by having this society that really has done an incredible amount to like being able to rule the planet because we've created this society. But that doesn't mean that we are the most hardy animal or hardy organism on the world. It just means that we've sort of clevered our way around all these near near

misses with death. Thank you mad scientists, right, remember, mad scientists have brought us all this quality of life so exactly exactly, but yeah, I mean, it is it isn't interesting because like I think, when we think about radiation, it's I kind of just wanted to bring it back to what we talked about at the beginning. It's not like mad scientists leading the charge, Like you're not like out there going like, let's blow up a bunch of nuclear plants and see what happens. No, I've never said

that that's true. I definitely I've never said that. No, we do create tiny explosions, but they're really tiny. We smash like one proton against another proton to see what happens, and it's very safe, deep underground and all that kind of stuff. And you know, there are chances that the collisions we make could create a black hole that eats up the Earth, but we're pretty sure those chances are very very small. How sure are you scaled one to ten?

If ten is very sure than ten, because because you know, these particles hit us from Earth, These particles are hitting Earth all the time from space much higher energies, and so if two particles colliding was going to create an Earth eating black hole, it would have happened already billions. Okay, so we're pretty sick. Yeah, that's what they all say.

Right before an earth eating black hole opens up. Well, we have never yet created an earth eating black hole, so our track record is perfect, and it's actually days days without creating an earth eating black hole. There's a website you can check. It's called has the Large hage On Collider destroyed the world yet? Dot com? And we promised to keep it always up to date. Okay, yeah, that's good. There's a very brief window when that website

actually going to be useful. Yeah, well, you know these things all have expiration dates on the Yes, that's true, that is true. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Daniel. I thought this was so great because I think it's sometimes hard to think about, like, well, wait, what does physics have to do with animals, especially like

particle physics? Like okay, I can think about the physics of like a kangaroo jump of what what the heck does particle physics have to do with animals and evolution? And it's but it's also inter length. I mean, animals are made out of particles. Everything's made out of particles exactly. Particle physics is the foundation of everything. Man, Yeah, what about wait, what about a piece of toast? Is that particles or made out a little toastino particles. Past about combos.

Combos can't be made out of particles. Now, those are not explained by physics. They're too delicious. It's just a mystery of science. Yeah, they're they're from a different universe, and it's just like no. I got into particle physics because I thought it was fascinating that you could like tear apart everything in the universe. Me and you and lava, and we're all made out of the same particles, just in different arrangements, even the rest of You've heard it

here first, folks. He wants to tear everything in the universe art and science espexually tear it apart. Okay, sure, sure thing. Well so you've got you have a podcast that is called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. And what do you guys do on the podcast, Well, we tried to explain the universe. We talk about little particles, We talked about supernova as, we talked about black holes,

we talk about stars within other stars. We talked about all the things that science has understood, but mostly we talked about the things that science has not understood, like what are the questions that science is asking right now about the nature of our universe, and I think people will be surprised to discover that most of the big questions we really have no clue about that how big is the universe? What is it made out of? All

this stuff? We're really just beginning to its started to understand what are the answers and even what are the right questions? I love Yeah, I love that, And I was listening to one of your episodes. I love the reference to the Douglas Adams like the forty two, like you you can't get you can't just ask like what's the meaning of life because then you get some kind of bizarre answers like well, you can't interpret that you're not asking the right question. But yeah, it's I know that.

For some interpretations of that is that it's scary that we don't know that much about the universe. But to me, it's actually really comforting because if we already knew everything, it's like, well, okay, then that's that's that. But not knowing stuff I think is not only exciting because it's like there's science isn't over. It feels like, oh, we already have iPhones, Like what Morkan. Science do, but there's so many discoveries to be made, and so many things

we don't know. Questions, questions we don't even know how to ask yet, which is hard to think about, Like we don't there are questions out there we can't even think to ask, and that's incredible. So I highly recommend uh that podcast Daniel and Porgey explain the universe is wonderful? And where can people find it? You got anything else to plug any any anywhere people can bother you, any

office hours you want to open up to the public. Um, Well, our podcast is produced by I Heart Media, so you can find it there, and I'm familiar with or anywhere

you get your podcasts, of course. And we wrote a book together called We Have No Idea, which is about this concept that we're just beginning to make discoveries in science and that in a hundred years people will look back and sort of laugh at our latest ideas are notions or how the universe might work, and try to give you a preview for what we might discover the next few hundred years. And you joke about office hours,

but I am a working professor. I teach and have office hours, and I have had podcast listeners look up by office hours and come on in from the street. This is pre pandemic days to ask me questions about dark matter and whatever. So if you have questions and you want them answer, to listen to our podcast. We also answer listening to questions well once once, once we've we've gotten through these pandemic times. I am just going to come over unannounced to have all these questions drop

on me and be very welcome. So thanks very much for having me on your podcast. I learned a lot about biology and radiation and crazy birds, so thanks very much. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I learned a lot about radiation in physics because surprisingly I don't know all that much about a lot of things. And we have three new Netflix shows to pitch. That's true, that's true. One of them was Tarter Grades in High School again Netflix, Quimby get back at Us. Yeah, thank you guys so

much for listening. If you want to rate, subscribe, download, there's a variety of buttons that you can press that interact with the podcast, and that actually really helps me. It teaches the robots that run these algorithms like, hey, this podcast is good and it also makes me feel really good. I read all of your reviews. I look at it like all the all the new new writings, and I read them and it just like I love

it when I get feedback from you guys. Um and thank you to the Space Colassics for their super groovy song. Ex Alumina. Creature features a production of I Heart Radio. To listen to more podcasts like the one you just heard, or to listen to Daniel Jorge Explain the Universe, check out the I Heart Radio website, the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you get your ding Ding podcast. See you next Wednesday,